Question

Hey I am wondering what the location option for the render method in rails is. The docs here http://guides.rubyonrails.org/layouts_and_rendering.html states:

“You can use the :location option to set the HTTP Location header:”

But I have no idea why you would do this, or what you would use this for.

Answer 1

Actually location option is used to redirect to a new resource as part of processing the request. For example,

 render :xml => post.to_xml, :status => :created, :location => post_url(post)

is telling the recipient that a XML file for the post is created and you will get this from post_url(post). Hence GO THERE 😉

render method does this by setting the Location option in response object

... ... ... 
if location = options[:location]
    response.headers["Location"] = url_for(location)
end
... ... ... 

You can find details about Location header here http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec14.html#sec14.30.